Bad Monkeys; Or how to jump-start the blood game?

[Baalz]

Bootstrapping a blood economy with no blood mages is definitely an uphill battle, and no, it is seldom efficient to have your pretender blood hunt. Not sure what you meant by turmoil, but there are a few magic sites which produce blood slaves, though they're few enough that you certainly can't count on them, and you're never gonna get too many slaves that way even if you're lucky.

The good news is, you can always start bloodhunting with any nation and never need to get your pretender involved. The great thing is that with traditionally blood nations you're not really reliant on blood for your bread and butter - you can just let your blood slaves stockpile for awhile to be used every now and then for something shiny.

There are three ways to do it. 1) Find an indie blood mage you can recruit (these are fairly rare, but keep your eyes open, the ones who can get a blood random are not nearly as rare) 2) If you're in a MP game trade somebody for 50 blood slaves to empower your first blood hunter (try to get them to throw in a sanguine dowsing rod). 3) The hard way: stick about 10 scouts in a province with more than 5000 pop and have them blood hunt for about 10 turns until you've scraped up 50 slaves.

[Micah]

Does anyone know how many brute-force hunters a province can support and keep the unrest manageable? I know 2 real blood hunters seldom get it to spike too high, and you can often cram 3 in a province, but does anyone have experience with brute-force?(at 0 taxes, no patrols)

[Hadrian_II]

I thin 3 blood hunters is the most you can get into one province, as even with 3 you need sometimes to pause the bloodhunting to let the unrest settle down.

[Baalz]

I use about 10 and it stays manageable until you get a couple lucky rolls and they actually pull in some slaves two turns in a row at which point its best to rotate them out to another province. Thing with the brute force is it's so variable its harder than it's worth to try and just smooth it out so you don't need to rotate.

[Velusion]

Baalz said:
I use about 10 and it stays manageable until you get a couple lucky rolls and they actually pull in some slaves two turns in a row at which point its best to rotate them out to another province. Thing with the brute force is it's so variable its harder than it's worth to try and just smooth it out so you don't need to rotate.

This sounds about right as I've used 8 in a province with little problem.

[DrPraetorious]

It's worth noting that there are also some summons with a chance at a blood random.

Aside from national summons, I know that 1/4 in Lamia Queens and 1/4 Ether Lords have a blood random. Of course, those require death, which Patala and MA Mictlan do not get, except maybe on heroes. But Lamia Queens and Ether Warriors are both nice in and of themselves, so it's no loss to make a bunch of them.

Personally, I think bootstrapping into blood magic is a waste (of player time, not of actual wealth, which can be more or less negligible,) unless you have powerful national summons, including especially nationally summonable bloodhunters.

Once MA Mictlan or Patala can get the blood economy rolling, it can self-sustain eventually, and comes with some nasty, nasty stuff.

[Sombre]

It clearly isn't going to help you win the game - it's simply too ineffective. But it can be fun and it is doable. Couple of things I'd like to add:

1. If you're using Conceptual Balance Mod, the blood fountain generates two blood slaves per turn. If you take him awake and blood hunt with him as well, this mounts up.

2. Bloodhunting your cap isn't actually that bad an idea if you have something like freespawn patrollers. You can also use call of the winds and similar spells to produce very effective patrollers for relatively little cost. With a nice little patrol force you can keep taxes at 100 and bloodhunt quite a bit. You lose your pop, so in the long run it's bad for you, but then again in the long run you're going for a blood economy which won't need much in terms of gold, resources etc and will be able to take more provinces to blood hunt as it rolls along.

Call of the winds also nets you a flying commander who can nip about scooping up harvested blood slaves and winging back to a lab.